The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted the latest in their series of interviews with PHP community members. In this new episode host Cal Evans talks with Morgan Tocker,

They talk about Morgan's talk at Sunshine PHP 2015 about tuning MySQL queries using some of the built-in tools). He also mentions some of the newer features of the EXPLAIN handling including more information provided and other metadata provided as a part of the output. They also talk about some of the "cost" data associated with different queries and how they effect performance.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest in their series of community interviews this time with Larry Garfield, an advocate and well-known speaker in the PHP and Drupal communities.

They talk about Larry's involvement with Cal's "secret project" (no longer secret): the Wisdom of the ElePHPant book. Larry shares the concept behind his entry based on a quote from Pablo Picasso and when to break the rules. They also talk about Drupal 8 and the current state of the project.

The GoPHP7 project has posted their initiative to try to improve the world of PHP for extensions and make them "first class citizens of the PHP community".

The goals of gophp7(ext) [are to]: get PHP extensions running "out of the box" when PHP7 is released (no lag time), make extensions in general easier to install and use (binaries, ppas), get more people involved in extension maintenance (and travis/appveyor running on them all, killing off bugs), get more documentation written for extension writing and codify some of the "best practices" of extension writing and design (a la PSR).

They're asking for help from anyone interested, even if you don't know C (what PHP extensions are written in). The project asks for just 30 minutes a day to help achieve their goals. The page also lists out the different ways you can help including cataloging the work that needs to be done on the catalog page and working on the development systems for PHP7 to make working with the extensions easier.

Matthew Setter was encouraged by some recent conversations and conference sessions about getting out into the PHP community and taking up presenting at conferences. In his latest post he talks about some of these conversations and his ideas moving forward.

[The PHP UK Conference 2015] was an especially meaningful conference for me, as the opening keynote, by @coderabbi, moved me to take more action, more serious, dedicated, and focused action than I've taken to date. [...] I sat there thinking "WOW, I'm really a part of the community". I also started thinking I want to contribute more, and build a profile just as big as his, and many of the others at the conference. So what to do?

He talks about the encouragement from others he's gotten to get up and present at a conference and the feedback he's gotten on his (unfortunately so far) rejected submissions. He's renewing his effort, though and has plans to document his progress via a "pseudo-journal" during his journey to hopefully serve as a guide to others wanting to share their knowledge with the community. He talks some about his plan moving forward and the work he's doing on the public speaking side to improve his skills.

While not for everyone, speaking at conferences is a great way to share experience, information and start conversations about new technology. If you've ever thought about making the move, follow Matthew's journey or check out theseotherarticles to help you get started.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest episode today in their series of community member interviews. In this latest episode host Cal Evanstalks with Ryan Weaver.

In this episode Cal and Ryan talk about the concept of "developer experience" (DX) and how the Symfony project has been working to make things easier. DX tries to make things that developers find consistently complex and simplify it. Ryan is hoping the concept will spread outside of the Symfony community into other groups.

Cal and Adam talk some about the event, how Adam thought it went and how strong the schedule was with great sessions. They also talk about how Sunshine PHP uses themes in their event (this year's was "teams"). They end the episode talking about what Adam learned from this year's event and the diversity of the crowd.

Cal Evans, a prominent member of the PHP community, has put together a new project sharing what he's called "Wisdom of the ElePHPant", a series of short thoughts by members of the PHP community touching on everything from the art of programming to helping out open source projects to working with code reviews.

All of these little nuggets of wisdom have been gathered and put into a small book, one per page. These books cannot be purchased but there are sources where you can find them and get a copy of your own (such as conferences, user groups or from various members of the PHP community). Fortunately, there was more than enough wisdom to go around and some of the submissions are also being shared on the site including current ones from Jeremy Kendall, Erika Heidi and Cal himself.

This is a great resource for some quick chunks of wisdom from developers who have seen (and overcome) a lot of the challenges developers experience every day. I highly suggest picking up a copy for yourself...if you can track one down. For more check out the project's main site, WisdomOfTheElePHPant.com.

Cal is joined by Beth Tucker Long, Jeff Rafter, Bryan Helmkamp and David Calavera. They talk about what Code Climate does, the services they offer and the languages they can test. They also talk about the free offering they have for public, open source repositories (but do have an option for private repositories). Cal also asks about what Code Climate can do to help reduce technical debt in current projects.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest episode in their interviews with members of the PHP community. In this latest show host Cal Evans talks with Jacob Mather, a co-organizer of the San Francisco PHP Meetup group.

They talk some about Jacob's more recent migration into the world of devops and what he enjoys about it. He talks about the work he does to make sure the developers don't have to worry as much about the environment. They also talk about his involvement in the SF.PHP user group and some of the exciting things they're doing.

As well as massive performance improvements, PHP 7's change / feature list is already looking great. You can find most of the features that have been accepted or are under discussion on the PHP Dev Wiki: RFCs section. But what changes would make a difference to you? What would you really like to see make it in (already suggested or a new suggestion)?

Here's just a few of the suggestions made by fellow Reddit users:

fixing inconsistencies in naming

sandboxed eval

a complete rework of the standard library

the introduction of generics

adding enum functionality

type aliasing

stack traces for fatal errors

Check out the full post for more ideas and feedback from other members of the community too. It's an interesting list of suggestions, some that are even already in the works.